Monday 16 June 1960, I was assigned to one of the crews. I was introduced to the crew chief whose name was Nick. Nick was an older man – probably thirty-five years old, but old to me – with wavy sun bleached hair, a receding hairline and a generally red brown, sun baked complexion. He had ice blue eyes. He had a distinct limp and kind of a to-the-right-slump in his overall frame. He had broken his back as a younger man in some kind of an accident, which had involved letting enough air out of the tires of his car to be able to sink down on a railroad track and go like hell. Apparently he had found it necessary to execute evasive action to avoid a train, and had come out the worse for it. I think he had significant pain associated with this malady.
Nick didn’t seem very interested in meeting me, which was fine with me, because my mother had told me that, since she worked for the company, the less any of the crews knew about me the better. She warned me about having a smart-assed-kid-whose-mother-works-in-the-head-shed attitude. So she had told me not to volunteer anything, and be damn circumspect in any information I gave in response to direct requests for information from the crews. So the fact that Nick had seemed to be a man of few words was a good thing.
I was the fourth person on the crew, counting Nick. When we got to wherever it was that we were going to do whatever it was that we were going to do, we sat in the rig for awhile as Nick scrutinized his notebook. Without any outward sign, but as if some inaudible starting horn had sounded Nick and the other two guys got out of the vehicle. The vehicle was a new thing to me. It was an International Harvester four door, two rows of seats with copious storage in back kind of vehicle. If I had had future sight, I would have described it as a crummy Cadillac Escalade. Oddly, the crew called it “the crummy”.
I knew nothing about surveying. I had been assured that I would be the most current of a long line of Pettijohn legacies who had learned the trade, and that all I needed to do was listen, and do as I was told, and work hard. That had seemed reasonable. What I hadn’t been told to factor into the learning process was the language barrier.
After some milling around and – to me – incomprehensible activity on the part of my three associates, Nick said something to me. If Nick was anything, he was laconic. And he mumbled. The one word I understood was “lagging”, or “nagging”, or “frigging” or something. Since he had accompanied whatever it was that he had said with an expansive gesture toward a distant hill, I thought that I knew that whatever it was that I was going to do involved that hill. I thought at frantic speed, reprocessing again and again what I had heard, and trying to make it mesh sensibly with the distant hill. But I couldn’t decipher it. I had to ask. Nick was already acting like he was dealing with a Cretin and asking him what he had said seemed to confirm his assessment. With as much understated disdain as I had ever experienced, he repeated himself. Or, at least, he said something slightly more clearly. I couldn’t tell whether it was exactly what he had said at first, but it had the same gesture toward the hill. He wanted me to go out to the hill with a “rod”, pound a “hub” into the ground, give him a “shot” with the “rod” on top of the “hub”, pound a “stake” behind the “hub” and “flag” the “stake”. That was clear. “What’s a rod?” I said. Nick’s disdain was palpable. It increased to an almost visible aura by the time I had asked the rest of the “what’s a …” questions. A rod was a twelve-foot long piece of mahogany with a metal face on one side. The face had feet calibrated to tenths. A hub was a foot long two by two with a milled point on one end. A shot was the focused view a level operator - a level being a telescope with a level bubble on a tripod - took of a rod, and then wrote in his book. A stake was just that: a pointed, foot long three by one half. Hubs and stakes were pointed so that they could be pounded into the ground. “Lagging”, or “nagging”, or “frigging” turned out to be “flagging”. Flagging was a roll of orange plastic material, about the size of friction tape. You “flagged” things with flagging. That made it easier to find them later, when as it turned out to be inevitably, the whole process needed to be repeated.
The day pretty well went downhill from that high point.
The next morning I was assigned to a different crew.
